In the political life of Taiwan, it is generally agreed
that the population of Taiwan is made up of four relevant major ethnic groups,
Indigenous peoples (原住民族
), Mainlanders (外省人),
Hakkas (客家人),
and Holos (鶴佬人
). While the former is of Malayo-Polynesian stock, the latter three are descendants
of those Han refugee-migrant-settlers of Mongolian race who sailed from China
as early as 400 years ago. Although there might be eleven patterns of ethnic
interactions theoretically, ethnic cleavages are to be found in three dyads
of relations: Indigenous peoples vs. Hans (漢人
, including Mainlanders, Hakkas, and Holos), Mainlanders vs.
Natives (本省人, including
Indigenous peoples, Hakkas, and Holos), and Hakkas vs.
Holos.

With its sheer population of 350,805 constituting merely
1.7% of the total population of 20,393,080 as reported in the 1990 census,
the Indigenous peoples are largely ignored by both the elites and the masses
of the Han settler society. As the mainstream understanding of Western liberal
democracy in Taiwan is vulgarly and narrowly confined to electoral democracy,
the principle of majority-rule carries the day without much due respect for
the minority. It is therefore not surprising to discover that the notion
of indigenous rights earnestly articulated in the Fourth World and carefully
tackled in the West is hold in contempt, if not ridiculed, by the ethnocentric
Han public opinion. Accordingly, indigenous issues have in the main been
neglected and placed a low priority and no resolute efforts have thus far
been made to redress the injustice incurred to Indigenous peoples.

After the war, the Nationalist (Kuomintang Party, or
KMT) government by and large followed its predecessors' practices. While exploration,
conquest, pacification, and at times segregation, containment, or relocation
had formerly alternated with one another, now subjugation, patronization,
and intolerance have been clothed in the forms of political co-optation,
economic domination, forced or induced cultural assimilation, social prejudice,
and welfare tokenism under the prevailing standards of integrationist orientation.
It is not an exaggeration to state that there have been numerous administrative
measures yet without formal Indigenous policy so far.

Thanks to the rise of social movements in the 1980s,
the wretched fate of Indigenous peoples began to draw special attention from
the media. Nonetheless, the popular perception of Indigenous peoples is invariably
in one form or another of social pathology in need of social relief at best,
or to be condemned to their own miserable destiny resulting from genetic
defects at worst. It was not until the mid-1990s when the ruling KMT failed
to win a stable majority in the Third Legislative Election (1995), that the
government was forced to consider those manifold appeals of the Indigenous
movement more seriously. To demonstrate their willingness to compromise,
a Commission of Indigenous Peoples was finally created by the central government
in 1996.

In retrospection, the basic tactic of the Pan-Indigenous
movement has been to strike a balance between staging non-violent protests
at streets with selected topics from time to time, and maneuvering various
coalitions with major political forces if necessary. Political outputs of
Indigenous struggle over a list of the collective rights to which they are
entitled are formally recorded at three interconnected legal arenas: constitutional,
legislative, and administrative ones. It should be noted that judicial instruments
generally found in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of customary laws have not been
espoused here, such as the Mabo v. Queensland case in Australia, the
Treaty of Waitangi and The Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand, or the Indian
Treaties in Canada.

In the following sections, while enunciating what responses
have been rendered by the government so far, we will sketch the challenges
of Indigenous peoples against the Han state in pursuing their collective
rights generally, and the rights to identify as indigenous, to self-identification,
and to self-determination particularly. Before our discussions, a brief outline
of the history of Taiwan is in order.

When Portuguese sailors "discover" Taiwan and hailed
it Ilha Formosa in alas in 1544, Indigenous peoples had resided here
for millenniums. The Dutch and the Spanish (driven out by the Dutch) briefly
occupied a pocket of land in southern and northern Taiwan separately before
the Chinese Ming Dynasty loyalist Koxinga (
國姓爺) expelled the Dutch in 1662, established a
restorative kingdom, and recruited Han settlers to cultivate the land. Taiwan
was annexed by the Chinese Ching Dynasty in 1683 and subsequently ceded to
Japan in 1895. After World War II, Taiwan was given up to the Republic of
China, whose Nationalist government, having been defeated by the Communist
Chinese, took refugee in Taiwan in 1949 and has reigned over the island ever
since.

Right to Identify as Indigenous
Peoples

The group name is to a large degree decided by the
dominant group, who, by definition, commands state apparatus and wields political
power. During the Ching Dynasty, Indigenous peoples were expeditiously assorted
into Sek-hoans (熟番
) and Chinn-hoans (生番
), each signifying civilized and uncivilized barbarians since for the Han
Chinese, all other peoples are nothing but barbarians, literally Hoan
(番). In expectation to
woo barbarian peoples (蕃人
) against its majority Han subjects, the Japanese colonial authority coined
a fantastic name Gosua tribes (高砂族
) for the former and Pepo tribes (平埔族
), meaning plain tribe, for the latter.

At first glance, "ethnic group" (
族群), a relatively novel concept borrowed from
the West, is omitted in the original text of the Constitution of the Republic
of China, promulgated in mainland China in 1947, let alone any mention
of indigenous or aboriginal peoples. Nevertheless, Article 5 decrees nominally
that all "nationalities" (民族
) are equal, and Article7 states that all "individuals" are equal regardless
their "races." (種族) Furthermore,
Articles 168 and 169 also specify particularly that the status and the development
of "frontier nationalities" (邊疆民族
) ought to be protected and promoted, and thereby accord Indigenous peoples
the status of frontier nationalities, read as "national minorities" (
少數民族) or "ethnic minorities" (
少數族群) in the Western tradition.

It is noted that Indigenous peoples are not ethnic
minorities or frontier nationalities per se although they are not mutually
exclusive. Nor are they completely coextensive synonyms.

Up to the mid-1990s, Indigenous peoples had been briefly
termed as Gausun tribes (高山族
), meaning "tribal people in high mountains," and subsequently as Sundee-tongbaus
(山地同胞), suggesting "those
compatriots in mountain areas," According to whether they reside either in
the mountain-hill or plain areas, most tribes had arbitrarily been classified
into Sundee-sunbaus (山地山胞
) and Pingdee-sunbaus (平地山胞
). However, since neither all Sundee-sanbaus reside in the officially
designated 30 Sundee (山地
, mountain-area) townships nor all Pingdee-sunbaus live at the plain
townships, this residential demarcation is no less senseless than earlier
practices based on degrees of acculturation. While Sundee-sunbaus is
curiously redundant, Pingdee-sunbaus is oxymoron since the term
Sunbaus (山胞) is the
abbreviation for Sundee-tongbaus. Politically, this classificatory
scheme had helped creating cleavages among Indigenous peoples.

As the group name Sunbaus had in the past been
stigmatized with loaded negative images, leaders of the Pan-Indigenous movement
firstly laid claim to the identity of being "the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan"
in order to forge their common group identity from different tribal identities.
In their hope to secure legitimacy as the genuine owners of the land, they
proposed the name Yuanchu-mingchu (原住民族
): while Yuanchu signifies the original residents, mingchu
emphasizes the meaning of peoples (in the plural) in place of tribes (
族).

In the beginning, this appeal met with some bitter
opposition from a few anthropologists who protested that those peoples were
not truly the first inhabitants of Taiwan judging from both fossil evidences
and pre-historical artifacts. Furthermore, since the Han Chinese consider
themselves the natives of China proper, any attempt to accord them the status
of being indigenous is considered by Chinese irredentists as an act of separatism.
The term Sian-chuming (先住民
), denoting "earlier residents," was offered instead, which illustrates their
ignorance of the universally accepted practice that indigenous people are
those who had resided in their homeland for some time long before settlers
arrived.

Moreover, the second half of the term mingchu
was bitterly assaulted from both the Chinese irredentist and the Taiwanese
separatist fronts. Since mingchu also stands for political nation in
addition to the loose usage of people, staunch proponents from both camps
disputed that the conception of multiple nations is not compatible with the
idea of nation-state in the existing Republic of China or the future Republic
of Taiwan. For the former, the Sunbaus are nothing but one branch
of the grandeur family tree of the Chinese nation (
中華民族, Chonghua-mingchu), which includes
the Hans, Manchus, Mongolians, Muslims, Tibetans, and others; and the latter
seem reluctant to permit any implied heterogeneity within a Taiwanese nation
in the making. Apparently both misconstrue the concept of nation.

By way of compromise, the dispute was eventually resolved
in 1994, when the National Assembly passed the Third Amendment of the
Constitution: the term Yuanchu-ming (
原住民, indigenous residents) first appears in Articles
1 and 9 instead of the heretofore much resented Sunbaus. Still, it
demonstrates that the majority of Han legislators have an aversion to the
preferred group name Yuanchu-mingchu (indigenous people). In the end,
the formally designated title for administrations charged with indigenous
affairs at all levels was dictated to take Yuanchu-ming. Nonetheless,
the term Yuanchu-mingchu was later smuggled in the revised Ordinance
of Naming (1995) and the Organizational Order for the Commission of
Indigenous Peoples (1996), and hidden in Article 10 of the Fourth
Amendment of the Constitution (1997) as the expression of Mingchu
(people).

Meanwhile, an unnoticeable Executive Order for Traditional
Name Resumption or Correction issued by the Department of Interior Affairs
in 1995 overtly carries Yuanchu-mingchu in its formal designation.
The Educational Act for Indigenous Peoples promulgated in 1997 also
employs Yuanchu-mingchu more confidently.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to note the endeavor
to downplay any separatist implications in this context. Different prefixes
have been added before Yuanchu-mingchu in various laws. A vague "Free
Area" (meaning Taiwan), for instance, is superimposed in Articles 1 and 4
of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution (1997). And "Taiwan Area"
is similarly added in the Statute for Promoting Indigenous Students
(1995) issued by the Department of Education. A blunt "Taiwan" is affixed
in the revised Ordinance of Naming (1995) and in the Executive Order
for Traditional Name Resumption or Correction (1995).

Right to Self-Identification

Until now, to be qualified as an indigene, one needs
to prove oneself or one's paternal (or at times, maternal) lineage was registered
as tribal peoples in the residential records during the Japanese rule. While
refusing such a subjective notion of self-identification as enshrined in
the ILO Convention No. 169 (1989), this institutionalized racial definition
in the tradition of jussanguinis also implicitly carries an
assimilationist connotation. Particularly, Pepo tribes ceased to be
recognized by the government after the war given the reason that they have
almost been completely assimilated by the Hans and lost their cultural attributes.

As is well known, except for the latecomer Mainlanders,
the other Han descendents (both Hakkas and Holos) are racially
Creole with various degrees of Pepo elements from ones' maternal lineage.
It is not until recently that some Pepos began to claim their indigenous
identity and to restore their cultural practices, especially festivals. Although
most leaders of the Pan-Indigenous movement have thus far embraced the
Pepos to join their united front, some have ambivalent reservations concerning
whether these half-brothers would dilute the purity of their aspiration.
It appears that the government is ready to recognize Pepos as indigenes
only if they are able to provide some solid proofs from aged residential
files documented half a century ago.

An unheard, yet by no means insignificant, appeal of
Indigenous peoples is to Romanize their tribal names phonetically rather than
to retain the designations assigned to them by the Han government since 1940s.
For one thing, Han characters frequently fail to represent the phonation
adequately. Atayal, for example, is pronounced as Taiya (
泰雅) and Amis as Amay (
阿美).

In addition, since Han ideographic characters would
contain connotations or/and denotations, the officially sanctioned tribal
names are inescapably filled with misperceptions or misunderstanding resulting
from their literal readings. For instance, Puyuma, officially listed
as 卑南and pronounced as
Benan, would imply "humbly south." The same embarrassment also incurs
the Bununs, who are hunters by origin and yet perceived as weaver-and-farmer
suggested unintentionally by Bunong (布農
).

Thirdly, some tribes are demanding that their group
names in Han characters be changed. For instance, some Tao (
達悟) elites have sought not to be recognized as
Yamei (雅美, meaning
graceful and beautiful) in the 1990s. The Amis are said to prefer
Bancha as their group name. Recently, the Tsous have successfully
replaced their authorized group name曹
with 鄒, pronounced similarly
in Holo and Mandarin and yet disparate in the official language, that
is, Mandarin. .

Controversy arises when the Torokos (
德魯固), hitherto classified as Atayals, claim
that they possess a unique group identity and insist that they be categorized
separately. The nearly extinct Saus (邵
) have met a similar fate. However, the government appears disinclined to
comply by enunciating genotypical as well linguistic similarities between
them. Although not documented in any laws, the official policy seems adamant
that there are only nine tribes of Indigenous peoples. It again reflects the
government's tendency to take an objective definition of group identity.

On the other hand, the quest for reverting to one's
traditional name from imposed Han name, which had been in force since 1946,
met little confrontation from the state or the society. Both the revised
Ordinance of Naming (1995) and the following Executive Order for Traditional
Name Resumption or Correction (1995) sufficiently express the government
is willing to com to terms with Indigenous peoples' demand as along as they
do not jeopardize the fundamental structure of the asymmetric Han-Indigenous
relations.

Paradoxically, few indigenes have applied for the name
reversion. Except for administrative considerations, probable explanations
are loss of tradition as a result of acculturation, fear for easy identification
as target of discrimination, or, what is worse, habituation to the dominant
Han culture. It proves that any legal measures without accompanied positive
incentives provided by the government are doomed to failure.

The quest for recognition as Indigenous peoples are
justifiable. As more and more peoples are undergoing their social construction
of indigenous identity, effective measures must be found to accommodate these
demands.

Right to Self-determination

The right to self-determination, most fundamental among
the collective rights of indigenous peoples, has been less disseminated and
thus met scanty academic discourse or popular opposition. With its broad
political implications, it is expected that this appeal will produce considerable
controversy and will not be considered in any kind once formally requested
by Indigenous peoples. However, since Taiwan was not a terra nullius
when colonists arrived nor have Indigenous peoples renounced their sovereignty,
they do have the right to self-determination, whatever their favored ways
to accomplish it are.

Various forms of political arrangement to materialize
the right have been envisaged by Indigenous peoples, ranging from American-styled
reservations, Chinese-fashioned autonomous regions, to outright irredentism
with any illusionary Pan-Malay-Polynesian associations. The most seemingly
feasible one is to transform the present indigenous townships into some form
of autonomous regions. A draft Bill of Local Self-rule, proposed by
Legislator Huang Herh-hsuan et al. In 1998, does attempt to incorporate the
notion of self-rule regions as suggested by indigenous activists. In the
end, the final version of the Local System Law (1999) fails to contain
any such clauses.

With its unitary tradition and lack of experience in
decentralization, the Han elites must have difficulty in envisioning such
a compromise. Furthermore, for fear of territorial fragmentation in case
some Indigenous peoples choose secessionism, the idea of establishing some
autonomous regions has not been well received. Although the concern of the
state to preserve its territorial integrity is legitimate, the right of Indigenous
peoples to self-determination can not be summarily denied.

As is already called to question, this envisaged administrative
arrangement might only constitute nominal change since the heads of these
townships have long been restricted to indigenes. Therefore, at issue would
be how much power will be devolved to these autonomous regions. In addition,
taking a tutelary perspective, some doubt whether Indigenous peoples are
sophisticated, if not advanced, enough to rule themselves. Naturally, a conceivable
but not necessarily reasonable concern is how to secure water resources,
forest conservatories, and national parks, mainly located in these regions.
Last but not the least, as more and more indigenes are moving to urban areas
and scattering around the country, territorial arrangements would be regretfully
incomplete.

Recurrently constrained by the preoccupation with administrative
expedience, the government has so far decided the possibility to accord only
the Taos, whose homeland is the offshore island Lanyu, certain degrees
of self-rule over their internal affairs in some forms of autonomous region
employed in China. Legislator Pa Yen Ta Lu has also recently suggested that
some indigenous townships can be consolidated into autonomous counties.

A pragmatic strategy in the interim to evade harsh
counteraction or obstruction is to forge a commission for each Indigenous
people. At the heart of this non-territorial design is what is currently being
practiced in parts of Belgium as corporate federation, where ethnic groups
with scattered membership would have a cultural commission to run their own
cultural, linguistic, educational, or religious matters. In the long term,
both territorial and non-territorial arrangements may coexist. For now, a
reformulation of the present Commission of Indigenous Peoples bestowed with
greater amount of executive power is realizable.

Ideally, each Indigenous people will have its own Commission
and enjoy certain amount of self-governing capacity. At the national level,
these Commissions would send equal number of representatives to the Commission
of Indigenous Peoples in a confederate fashion to deal with the central government
in a nation-to-nation manner. The election of those Commissioners at the
tribal level is not inconceivable since Indigenes peoples have until now
selected their own members of the quasi-bicameral parliament in a corporate
way. In reality, Sundee and Pingdee Indigenous peoples constitute
two separate constituencies and each is allocated four seats in both the
National Legislature and the National Assembly, which is also known as single-nontransferable-vote
(SNTV).

Fiscal endowments come into question as Indigenous
peoples are repeatedly suspected whether they are in any position to sustain
themselves economically. Aside from fiscal centralization embedded in the
current central-local relationships desperately in need of adjustments, franchise
fees or permit fares, for instance, may be levied on the use of natural resources
or national parks. To the bottom, the issue of land rights must open to dialogues
leading to just restitution in either monetary or other terms of reparation
for lands lost or confiscated without consent.

Replicating Articles 168 and 169 of the Constitution
, both the Second and the Third Amendments of the Constitution
(1992, 1994) provide that the state ought to ensure the status and political
participation of Indigenous peoples and to promote their education, culture,
welfare, and economy. However, the well-intended goal is to offer paternalistically
humanistic protection, guidance, and support to minorities, rather than reparations
to indigenous peoples for the past injustice. As the number of guest workers
is exceeding that of Indigenous peoples, the revised Employment and Service
Law (1997) and the recently revised Governmental Procurement Law
(1998) prescribe that measures must be taken to recruit a reasonably adequate
number of indigenous employees. Although preferential treatments in higher
education have been provided for years, no schools designed primarily for
and by indigenes have been yet created as called for.

In the meantime, Article 10 Clause 10 of the Fourth
Amendment of the Constitution (1997) prefixes "based on [Indigenous] peoples'
willingness," and is thus optimistically interpreted as the clause for indigenous
group rights (民族條款). An
Educational Act for Indigenous Peoples was thereafter developed in
1998. A Developmental Law for Indigenous Peoples, which is a comeback
of the stalled Basic Law for the Protection of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples
drafted by Legislator Tsai Chong-han et al. in 1991, is currently under
scrutiny by the Commission of Indigenous Peoples. Apparently, the ambitious
bill is reflecting attempts to echo the United Nations Draft Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1995) in a comprehensive fashion.

Conclusions

The Hans seem determined to maintain their political,
economic, cultural, and social domination as President Lee Teng-Hui's recent
appeal Indigenous peoples that they ought to integrate themselves with the
mainstream society has demonstrated. Without a bill of rights in any format,
an anti-discrimination constitutional or at least legislative provision transposing
international norms is at least warranted. Although a signatory of the
ILO Convention No. 107 (1957), the government has yet to rectify its
integrationist orientation that the ILO Convention No. 169 (1989)
is to remove.

On balance, existing mechanisms and standards to deal
with the protection of ethnic minorities in general and with guarantee the
rights of Indigenous peoples in particular are scanty in the context of the
protection of individual human rights sanctioned under traditional liberalism.
What is further required is some norms and commitment to ensure group rights
of Indigenous peoples. Ingenious political procedures and institutions may
be explored.

Politically, the voting power Indigenous legislators
can hardly put forward any major bills without sympathetic support from Han
legislators, except at rare occasions as happened at the Third Legislature
(1996-98), although quotas have been set for Indigenous peoples in the National
Legislature (and in the National Assembly). Unfortunately, the mainstream
assessment tends to deem the quotas are already over-representative for the
population of Indigenous peoples although some indigenous activists have
proposed that each tribe be assigned at least one seat since all tribes are
equally unique and thus in need of their own representatives. More ominously,
as the ruling KMT has won an impermeable majority in the Fourth Legislative
Election in 1998, it is doubtful whether any space may be created where any
benevolent deals will be reached.

By any means, there is no way Indigenous peoples may
exercise minority veto as performed in consociational democracy. To be sure,
nonetheless, the legitimacy of the state is always precarious before any
nation-to-nation treaty is negotiated between the Hans and Indigenous peoples
after genuine dialogues have been ceaselessly undertaken.

Immediately underlying the Han-Indigenous polemics
is not whether the government recognizes group rights of Indigenous peoples
but rather whether the chauvinistic Hans are ready to receive Indigenous peoples
as human beings. If the Hans are not willing to reconcile themselves with
Indigenous peoples, it is equally unimaginable that the cleavages among the
three Han ethnic groups will be sufficiently resolved. Much less is it possible
that there will be any true reconciliation between China and Taiwan.

Ultimately, the Han culture has largely defined norms,
enforced laws, and design institutions without taking indigenous culture
into account. As members of an adolescent society still in the making, the
Hans still have the opportunity to redeem themselves form the original sin.
Legal guaranty of indigenous rights can not promise mental desegregation,
unless multiculturalism replaces monoculturalism in this Han dominated society.
In the end, Taiwan is not a Han-Chinese society with marginal non-Han Indigenes,
but rather one with coequal Indigenous peoples and non-indigenous Hand.

*Ph.D. in political science with a
specialty in ethnic politics from the Ohio State University in 1991; self-identified
as Holo with maternal Hakka and probably Makato-Siraya Pepo
descent. For correspondence: P.O. Box 26-447, Taipei 106, TAIWAN; tel: 886-2-2706-0962;
fax: 886-2-2707-7965; e-mail: ohio3106@ms8.hinet.net;
homepage: http://mail.tku.edu.tw/default2.html
.